Building a Bigger, Better Bagel

Much like the recently departed Queen Elizabeth, the Bagel King of New Jersey was accorded special treatment by Russian authorities when he arrived in Moscow.


Unlike the other passengers on the flight from New York, George Haug was whisked through customs at Sheremetyevo-2 as he carried his bag with several pounds of fine white powder -- dough softener and special yeast. His hosts, knowing the powder might cause a problem, had made arrangements for Haug's speedy processing.


Not too long after the auspicious entrance, Haug found himself in the kitchen of a Moscow restaurant, working over boiling vats of water and next to a hot stove. A few days and hundreds of bagels later, Haug, the owner of a chain of New Jersey bagel stores, was ecstatic: "This is, like, an incredible fact for me, to come to Russia and make a bagel, a beautiful bagel."


At the invitation of Jeff Zeiger, the director of Moscow's TrenMos restaurants, Haug made the first international trip of his life earlier this month -- in order to perform some first aid at Moscow's first bagel outlet.


"They were good, but everybody who ate them said something was missing," said Zeiger, 28, of Trenton, New Jersey. "We brought him in not only to look at the bagel and improve it, but also to explore expanding the business into distribution -- not only to the foreign market, but to what we believe is the more solid market, the Russian market."


Plump, chewy and with a reassuring density, the bagels Haug made during his Moscow stay are on par with what a New York delicatessen might offer.


Sitting in the small dining room of the caf? on a recent weeknight, Haug showed off his new, improved bagel and offered a lesson in why it was better. Explaining that the anterior and posterior of a bagel should be barely distinguishable, he gently turned over a poppy-seed specimen. "Nice bottom," noted Haug, whose biggest store produces 100,000 bagels a week. "There is a soul to these bagels. You can feel it."


Part of the problem with the store's old bagels, Zeiger said, was that they had been modeled on the native Russian bublik, the lean, somewhat plain grandfather of the bagel.


"It took a week of experimenting to come up with the old bagel," said Zeiger. "But we had nothing better to model it on than the bublik."


Volodya Yakimov, the man who came up with the old bagel, studied with Haug to develop the new version. "He can't speak Russian," said Yakimov. "I can't speak English. Yet we worked together, by ourselves. A baker's intuition."


Yakimov concedes the new bagels taste better, but he noted the irony of an American coming to Russia to introduce a variation of the bublik. "With a lot of things, the technology starts in Russia, goes to the West and comes back to Russia. Eventually, we end up buying what we can do ourselves."


By November, with the purchase of new bagel-making equipment, the bagel shop is set to increase its capacity to 600 bagels an hour, up from the current 100 a day. Zeiger is confident that an initial market can be found with local hotels and airports. But that, he says, is only the beginning. With Haug and Bob Tulipan of Jersey City as partners, Zeiger hopes to open up a full-scale bagel factory and distribution center.


Zeiger, who has a keen sense of marketing, was eager to package the Bagel King in as compelling a way as possible.


"George would love to be the bagel tsar," he said.


Haug was more humble. "The product will talk for itself."